Well. We took the afternoon off on Friday. Put up a sign in the window that read: “Closed early for a good old fashioned bike ride. The mechanics want to ride too!”
The plan was to ride to Elkton (40 highway miles) from CG. We left our house with full water bottles & a few random snacks for the back hills of rural Oregon. That was around 2:30.
We rode over Gowdyville and made a split decision with the use of a Powerbar as our coin & decided to take a “new” route. We saw no more than 5 cars the whole time. The first 20-30 miles we pretty much knew where we were, it was finding the path to Tom Folley road that gave us a bit of trouble. Eric wrote down a few key roads for us to look for using our Oregon Gazetteer. You know the ones with tiny squiggly red lines that usually lead to confusion….
Various big rigs would roll by, Eric would wave them down & confirm that his directions were reliable.
“We’re trying to get to Elkton.”
“Elkton? That’s pretty far from here.”
“We started in Cottage Grove.”
“Shoot, I can’t even drive that far.”
“We want to find Tom Folley road that spits us out right before the Elk Creek tunnel.”
“Oh, that’s a ways….gravel too.”
After about 3 of those conversations (one with a petite Granny - big rifle in hand and curlers in her hair) we found a good ol’ boy that gave us some decent directions.
“Here’s what you do. Follow this road for another 10 miles. You’ll see a big gravel pile, then on the left a concrete bridge that goes over Johnson Creek. Stay on the pavement and then take a right…that’ll take you to Tom Folley road.”
Got it…10 miles, a left at the gravel pit at a concrete bridge. Stay on the pavement, then a right…..
We followed the directions as best we could, past the gravel pile and left across a concrete bridge….onto a dirt road. Hmmm….maybe he meant stay on the pavement until here. We followed that logging road over the hill, scared a bear along the way and eventually made it to another paved road. At this point the “we might have to camp out here tonight” conversation began & Chris said if things got bad, he’d eat us. The only thing we could do was keep riding…
At that point we decided this must be where we take a right. We rode mostly down hill for several miles and realized we lost the sound of cars as we headed farther in that direction. We did a bit of back tracking, checked out the sun & realized that the tracks from the logging equipment were going left… Surely they must be heading towards some sort of civilization. Left it was down the steep hillside and along a familiar looking creek. Nine miles later we finally reached the destination we had been looking forward to all day. By the time we saw the lights of the tunnel it was around 9 pm. Just enough time to push the button for the bike sign to flash and get ourselves over the hill and into Elkton before complete darkness. I’ve never been so happy to see that scary, narrow tunnel.
We reached Elkton in time to get the food we’d been dreaming of since 5pm….sports drinks, savory snacks.
Ah, the road less traveled is rewarding….
